Update: Laurel And Hardy… well Arch actually

“What’s new this week Dan?” Well, I’m glad you asked me that question. I’ve been busy as ever getting up to all kinds of open source and Linux related shenanigans (Love that word and it’s criminally underused). I’ve been testing out Arch Linux finally after much delay and procrastination. It’s gonna be a few days before the review is ready I’m afraid but it’s been really interesting so far and with the help of the very well written documentation, I’ve got Arch installed with a Gnome desktop. There’s still a lot to do and I hope to get into that tomorrow but I’ve been busy testing a few things this week so far.

Last Friday (April 19th) I downloaded the latest daily build of Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 and installed it on my Dell XPS m1330n, I later found out that this was the release candidate but I didn’t know that at the time. I’ve been running it a few days now and I have to say it’s working well. I should write a proper review I suppose and I’ll try to get to that soon. It’s far from perfect in my eyes but it’s definitely a good distro with a lot going for it. The reason I installed it was because we scheduled a special episode of Linux Outlaws for the Hardy release, I thought it might help if I’d actually tried it before we talked about it… “that’s never stopped you before!” I hear you cry 🙂

So it’s the big day then, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS (to give it it’s full title) is out and ready for download. The servers may be busy as there’s a bit of a rush on but if you’re interested you can go and get it RIGHT NOW!Episode 35 of Linux Outlaws is also out to coincide with that so if you want to hear our opinions on it head over to www.linuxoutlaws.com and have a listen ch-ching hehe 🙂

I’ll write up some thoughts on Hardy and probably publish before the weekend, just to those of you unfamilar with my superhuman abilty to avoid work, “probably” means “probably not” in this case ok? I’ll do my best though promise. For now it’s back to fiddling with this Arch install and trying to get everything working before the review of doom ™ watch this space, not for too long without a break though or your eyes will get sore. Take care and remember to keep it open source, you know it makes sense.

4 comments on “Update: Laurel And Hardy… well Arch actually”

I, too, need to write a review of Ubuntu 8.04. I installed it on my HP laptop this morning as well as a faculty member’s Asus EEE PC (off a USB jump drive), and so far it seems REALLY slick. They’ve tuned up the 3D Desktop effects, and wireless is working well, and I hear that standby works decently (though it’s slow to wake up). Took most of the EEE’s hard drive, but I think the owner will be well satisfied.

Were you aware that your RSS provides summaries rather than full text? Just curious, as RSS is something I’ve been looking into more (just overhauled my website last week) and I recently started using Google Reader. Was confused for a second why you’d stopped writing in the middle of a sentence until I realized it wasn’t feeding full articles 😛

Also, I’m listening to your podcast right now. I’ve always used VMWare for virtualisation; I don’t have a problem with non-open as long as the software is good, which is why I’m pro-Adobe 😛 (Supposedly, CS2 works through Wine?)

I’m be really curious whether you two are having the same problems after a fresh install of the final version of 8.04.

Also, as part of my own fanboyism, I feel it bears saying that the point of an LTS version isn’t to introduce a ton of new features, but to really mortar in the old features, get them solid and stable, and everything playing well together. Looking forward to 8.10, we’ve got some really nice new features coming (full graphical overhaul?), but I guarantee that it’ll be less stable. The decision to have Firefox 3 beta is, as you noted, controversial, but I can see their logic: since this is LTS, they put the next version on now so people aren’t surprised when it comes out in short order, and instead people can keep using the same browser over the long term.

Can’t wait to get my lappy home and see if my camera works again (it worked in Feisty, did not in Gutsy).

Hi Matthew, thanks for the comments. I was aware of the RSS thing. I changed it from full posts to excerpts because my long articles were so big and had so many pictures in them that people had trouble loading the feeds. They were HUGE hehe 🙂

I take your point and I see what you mean about LTS and stability. I thought I’d mentioned that but as I said on the show I always want more. I always think things can be improved, it’s a personal thing. I was advised by someone on our forums that I should turn hardware virtualization support on in BIOS to use KVM. I did that but it still didn’t fix the problem so I guess I’m in vmware for now. It works well for me. Good luck with the web cam, Dan